Yoko Ono discharged from hospital in New York

The artist Yoko Ono, the widow of the late former Beatle John Lennon, has been released from a New York City hospital after being treated for the flu.

Her representative Elliott Mintz told the Associated Press on Saturday she has been discharged. On Friday, Mintz denied US media reports that Ono, 83, had suffered a possible stroke or heart attack, and said he understood she would be released from the hospital on Saturday.

Trump is Time Magazine's Person of the Year

Trump is Time Magazine's Person of the Year

Yoko Ono hospitalized with flu-like illness

Yoko Ono's spokesman says the widow of the late former Beatle John Lennon has been admitted to a New York City hospital after complaining of severe flu-like symptoms.

Ono had called her doctor, who said her symptoms sounded like the flu, and advised her to go to the hospital as a precaution, Mintz said. He did not know if she admitted herself or was taken by ambulance.

Her career as an artist has spanned more than five decades. Last year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York marked her achievements with an exhibition of her early works showing how her ideas influenced the development of art in the city in the 1960s.

Yoko Ono at the Museum of Contemporary Art, November in 2013. Photo: Supplied

Ono, also an experimental musician and film-maker, was once described by Lennon as "the world's most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name but nobody knows what she does."

She and Lennon were married on March 20, 1969, and their son, Sean, was born in 1975. Lennon was shot to death on Dec. 8, 1980, outside the famed Dakota apartment building just west of New York's Central Park.

Sean Ono Lennon said on Twitter on Saturday that his mother was "running about as usual" after getting home. He says he may now get a flu shot.